An interesting night of testing

Last night I did our first ever live benchmarking session using the just-arrived Radeon Vega Frontier Edition air-cooled graphics card. Purchased directly from a reseller, rather than being sampled by AMD, gave us the opportunity to testing for a new flagship product without an NDA in place to keep us silenced, so I thought it would be fun to the let the audience and community go along for the ride of a traditional benchmarking session. Though I didn’t get all of what I wanted done in that 4.5-hour window, it was great to see the interest and excitement for the product and the results that we were able to generate.

But to the point of the day – our review of the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics card. Based on the latest flagship GPU architecture from AMD, the Radeon Vega FE card has a lot riding on its shoulders, despite not being aimed at gamers. It is the FIRST card to be released with Vega at its heart. It is the FIRST instance of HBM2 being utilized in a consumer graphics card. It is the FIRST in a new attempt from AMD to target the group of users between gamers and professional users (like NVIDIA has addressed with Titan previously). And, it is the FIRST to command as much attention and expectation for the future of a company, a product line, and a fan base.

Other than the architectural details that AMD gave us previously, we honestly haven’t been briefed on the performance expectations or the advancements in Vega that we should know about. The Vega FE products were released to the market with very little background, only well-spun turns of phrase emphasizing the value of the high performance and compatibility for creators. There has been no typical “tech day” for the media to learn fully about Vega and there were no samples from AMD to media or analysts (that I know of). Unperturbed by that, I purchased one (several actually, seeing which would show up first) and decided to do our testing.

On the following pages, you will see a collection of tests and benchmarks that range from 3DMark to The Witcher 3 to SPECviewperf to LuxMark, attempting to give as wide a viewpoint of the Vega FE product as I can in a rather short time window. The card is sexy (maybe the best looking I have yet seen), but will disappoint many on the gaming front. For professional users that are okay not having certified drivers, performance there is more likely to raise some impressed eyebrows.

Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Specifications

Through leaks and purposeful information dumps over the past couple of months, we already knew a lot about the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition card prior to the official sale date this week. But now with final specifications in hand, we can start to dissect what this card actually is.

Vega Frontier Edition

Titan Xp

GTX 1080 Ti

Titan X (Pascal)

GTX 1080

TITAN X

GTX 980

R9 Fury X

R9 Fury

GPU

Vega

GP102

GP102

GP102

GP104

GM200

GM204

Fiji XT

Fiji Pro

GPU Cores

4096

3840

3584

3584

2560

3072

2048

4096

3584

Base Clock

1382 MHz

1480 MHz

1480 MHz

1417 MHz

1607 MHz

1000 MHz

1126 MHz

1050 MHz

1000 MHz

Boost Clock

1600 MHz

1582 MHz

1582 MHz

1480 MHz

1733 MHz

1089 MHz

1216 MHz

-

-

Texture Units

?

224

224

224

160

192

128

256

224

ROP Units

64

96

88

96

64

96

64

64

64

Memory

16GB

12GB

11GB

12GB

8GB

12GB

4GB

4GB

4GB

Memory Clock

1890 MHz

11400 MHz

11000 MHz

10000 MHz

10000 MHz

7000 MHz

7000 MHz

1000 MHz

1000 MHz

Memory Interface

2048-bit HBM2

384-bit G5X

352-bit

384-bit G5X

256-bit G5X

384-bit

256-bit

4096-bit (HBM)

4096-bit (HBM)

Memory Bandwidth

483 GB/s

547.7 GB/s

484 GB/s

480 GB/s

320 GB/s

336 GB/s

224 GB/s

512 GB/s

512 GB/s

TDP

300 watts

250 watts

250 watts

250 watts

180 watts

250 watts

165 watts

275 watts

275 watts

Peak Compute

13.1 TFLOPS

12.0 TFLOPS

10.6 TFLOPS

10.1 TFLOPS

8.2 TFLOPS

6.14 TFLOPS

4.61 TFLOPS

8.60 TFLOPS

7.20 TFLOPS

Transistor Count

?

12.0B

12.0B

12.0B

7.2B

8.0B

5.2B

8.9B

8.9B

Process Tech

14nm

16nm

16nm

16nm

16nm

28nm

28nm

28nm

28nm

MSRP (current)

$999

$1200

$699

$1,200

$599

$999

$499

$649

$549

The Vega FE shares enough of a specification listing with the Fury X that it deserves special recognition. Both cards sport 4096 stream processors, 64 ROPs and 256 texture units. The Vega FE is running at much higher clock speeds (35-40% higher) and also upgrades to the next generation of high-bandwidth memory and quadruples capacity. Still, there will be plenty of comparisons between the two products, looking to measure IPC changes from the CUs (compute units) from Fiji to the NCUs built for Vega.

The Radeon Vega GPU

The clock speeds also see another shift this time around with the adoption of “typical” clock speeds. This is something that NVIDIA has been using for a few generations with the introduction of GPU Boost, and tells the consumer how high they should expect clocks to go in a nominal workload. Normally I would say a gaming workload, but since this card is supposedly for professional users and the like, I assume this applies across the board. So even though the GPU is rated at a “peak” clock rate of 1600 MHz, the “typical” clock rate is 1382 MHz. (As an early aside, I did NOT see 1600 MHz in any of my testing time with our Vega FE but did settle in a ~1440 MHz clock most of the time.)

The specs they list for the cards are impressive and compare favourably to NVIDIA's P100 which is the card AMD tested against, offering higher TFLOPS for both FP32 and FP16 operations though the memory bandwidth lags a little behind.

Radeon Vega
Frontier Edition

Quadro GP100

GPU

Vega

GP100

Peak/Boost Clock

1600 MHz

1442 MHz

FP32 TFLOPS (SP)

13.1

10.3

FP64 TFLOPS (DP)

0.819

5.15

Memory Interface

1.89 Gb/s
2048-bit HBM2

1.4 Gbps
4096-bit HBM2

Memory Bandwidth

483 GB/s

716 GB/s

Memory Size

16GB HBC*

16GB

TDP

300 W air, 375 W water

235 W

The memory size for the Vega is interesting, HBC is AMDs High Bandwidth Cache Controller which not only uses the memory cache more effectively but is able to reach out to other high performance system memory for help. AMD states that the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition has the capability of expanding traditional GPU memory to 256TB; perhaps allowing new texture mods for Skyrim or Fallout! Expect to see more detail on this feature once we can get our hands on a card to abuse, nicely of course.

AMD used the DeepBench Benchmark to provide comparative results, the AMD Vega FE system used a dual socketed system with Xeon E5 2640v4s @ 2.4Ghz 10C/20T, 32GB DDR4 per socket, on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with ROCm 1.5, and OpenCL 1.2, the NVIDIA Tesla P100 system used the same hardware with the CuDNN 5.1, Driver 375.39 and Cuda version 8.0.61 drivers. Those tests showed the AMD system completing the benchmark in 88.7ms, the Tesla P100 completed in 133.1 ms, quite an impressive lead for AMD. Again, there will be much more information on performance once the Vega FE can be tested.

Read on to hear about the new card in AMD's own words, with links to their sites.